The first TJ newspaper was published by students 64 years ago. photo by Harper Skurky-Thomas
TJ’s archive of student newspapers gives us a glimpse into the past.
Anyone who has been at Thomas Jefferson High School for multiple years can understand the regularity of change. With different rules, classes, teachers, and students, the school is constantly fluctuating, and 2025 Seniors have been subjected to three separate class schedules in four years. TJ has been around for a lot longer than four years, though, and there have been changes both globally and locally since the school’s founding in 1960. One of the consistent threads throughout TJ history is the newspapers and journalism class.
TJ journal articles have been available on the school’s website since 2007, but before that, editions were printed and sold to the student body. The old newspapers, dating back to the early 1960s, have been sitting in the journalism classroom ever since. They serve as a time capsule and represent what TJ students from the past thought, wrote, and cared about. They include articles about topics like wars, segregation, drugs, and elections while also having smaller-scale articles about dress codes, senior superlatives, and football scores.
These articles, most of them decades old, illustrate how much TJ has evolved over the years. The school rules change in minor ways every year, and those small changes add up. For example, the dress code has been completely rewritten multiple times over the decades. The original dress code banned “extreme hair styles,” winter coats, and hoodies for boys. The regulations also banned pants, “pant-dresses,” and the wearing of sandals for girls—very different from the lax dress code of the present. In 1969, the rules were revised to allow more clothing options and shorter skirts. As time went on, the dress code continued to change until TJ ended up with the current one.
When it was first founded, TJ taught 7th and 8th graders in addition to 9th-12th graders. Each article is signed with the real name of the student writers. These names can be found across different articles and on the internet in the form of Linkedin profiles, Facebook pages, and obituaries. Each of the people in the printed newspapers have gone on to leave TJ and live their own lives. Their presence in the articles is a rare record of their presence at this school. The principal when the school opened, James T. Reiva, died after just two years at the school in 1962. His picture is not displayed on the wall with all other principals in room 111, so the school newspaper is one of the only sources available to students which displays what he looked like along with the life he lived.
While the monthly publication has slowly transitioned into sporadically uploaded online articles and a daily Spartan Edition, the content remains surprisingly similar. The very first newspaper, from September 1962, talks about an upcoming football game against George Washington High School. Early articles complain about freshmen being annoying in the hallways and lunch periods being too short. Even articles that are solidified in a past time period can feel painfully relevant. These newspapers may be filled with little details and remnants from the TJ of the past, but that makes them no less important to the TJ of the present.
